


Antic/Antique/Antigone

by lazarwolff



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: #panic!atthefuneral, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Always, Angst, Canon Gay Relationship, Class Differences, For the most part, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Makeup, Mental Health Issues, Misgendering, Modern Speech, Mythology References, Public Nudity, References to Depression, Trans Male Character, Transphobia, Trauma, Twitter, a little fear shakespeare, scatological humour, that kid is an ocean away from his folklore degree, veiled references to hamlet's fashion sense, what if he ate an oil painting or two, what if his madness was an extended performance art piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 11:07:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18755227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazarwolff/pseuds/lazarwolff
Summary: Unf*ck Your Habitat, Elsinore edition: Hamlet is just as tired as Horatio to find that the old man didn't stay in the grave, and what the price for permanent interment might be. Horatio wants Hamlet to be the kind of gravedigger who goes home for drinks after. At no point do either of them ask if twisty political intrigue actually sparks joy. This is called hamartia in my circles.“I want to be home now.”“You must live this shit out. I know, it’s absolute shit, but home’s on the other side.”“The Augean stables,” Hamlet sighed, let Horatio cling tighter, if possible.“I said I handed you the shovel,” Horatio reminded. “I might as well set you to the task. So what task, my Lord?”





	Antic/Antique/Antigone

“You came here to bury the bastard, not excavate him,” Horatio mumbled in the Prince’s chambers, and maybe if Hamlet could break his true love’s heart with only a few words, it would be easier to kill someone he loathed.

“Nothing stays buried here,” he said, frustrated already by his attempt to explain Elsinore. How could he? Blissfully untouched by the Enlightenment, it seemed, and adhering to a geocentric view of the universe where the court was the absolute centre, and the King its kernel.

“And I handed you the fucking shovel.” Horatio looked miserable, and Hamlet covered his own eyes, rubbing deeply with his palms to try and abate the deep loathing which started like twin orbital headaches. He saw too much, and sometimes he thought he understood, inferred even more, and yet... “Sweet Lord…”

“You know, nobody calls me ‘sweet,’” Hamlet hissed out, humiliated by his anger, understanding it as a base reaction to the raw fear he felt when he saw Horatio outside of the context of school, in the rat trap of Elsinore, and that was good, he should keep that for later, if there was much later left… but put away the aspiring playwright, the sitting Queen was who he needed right now. “And nobody calls me Prince or Lord, by the way. Except for you, you infuriating, mealy-mouthed, climbing  _ pleb, _ and that’s just when you want to get the last word in when I’m talking circles when you wish to talk  _ reason  _ to me. Dirty tricks all, the rhetoric of the over-educated under-class. But now you’ve seen how it goes in Elsinore, after years of my telling you  _ not to ever ever come why did you come _ . Pageantry and cannons and funeral selfies and murder and ghosts! It’s my birthright to be as mad, unreasoned, and circling around the point always, I wish I had disclosed sooner, instead of letting you try to get through to me with your tender numbers and your intuition for effective film-editing, and oh by the withered Viking gods of my forebears, who could forget your  _ ethics… _ ”

“Prithee, my  _ good, _ sweet lord. Prince of Danes. King of everything dearer.”

“Stop.”

He did stop the nonsense praise, a mercy, but his long fingers encircled Hamlet’s wrists and pulled them down, and Hamlet slumped, eyes still tightly shut, into Horatio’s chest, relieved a little that he couldn’t ruin Horatio with his words, that he hadn’t yet grown that rotten. Perhaps the cold which settled in his heart had slowed the decomposition.

“I can hardly sleep without you near, to begin with,” Hamlet whispered by way of repentance. “I will sleep less if you hazard the room they give you. The guest rooms don’t have knives under the pillows. Just chocolates on top.”

“I’ve missed you too,” Horatio said, and the wry chuckle rumbled in his chest, jarred Hamlet from his impromptu pathetique. “I can’t say I’ve had sound sleep as of late, either. The manic 3 am symposia on  _ Death of a Salesman  _ or  _ The Sorrows of Young Werther  _ were becoming my lullaby.”

“I kick you in my sleep.”

“Not very hard. You skip leg day. When you bother with the gym.”

“You’re a class traitor. I’ve deradicalized you.”

“Ah, that old bit. I’ve missed rebutting that one. I like to think I radicalized you a little in return.”

“You’re sleeping with me for the money.”

“Absolutely. It’s called direct action. I’m sleeping with a figurehead of a Prince so I can redistribute all his money and his summer house and the two or three vehicles we’re both too gay to drive…”

Hamlet couldn’t help but snicker at this old inside joke, then actually looked at Horatio for the first time since the clock struck twelve and he saw in the gooseflesh his dearly departed father. Horatio looked the same as ever, unchanged yet by the nightmare of this court.

“Elsinore makes me so grey, petty,” Hamlet finally said. “And now I must stay so I can become a murderer, and worse, a King. But you--”

“I’m not leaving.”

“You’re still good, you’re still…”

“Stop calling me good, like you’re not,” Horatio insisted. “No ghost drove me here, save your touch lingering on my shoulders, your notes in my books, in permanent ink, I might add, do they have pencils in Denmark or are all mistakes for keeps? Never mind the explosion of a wardrobe you left in your haste to come here and be the dead King’s dutiful heir. I am compelled by someone who is yet alive, someone who is yet more precious for it.”

“But your studies.”

The last bullet in his gun and they both knew it to be a blank.

“I deferred for a year. You were correct in your assessment that I’m no truant. But by George, I do make very good excuses.”

_ By George.  _ Hamlet loved him, couldn’t bear to part with him, but...

“My gorgon of a mother is going to put you in the garden alongside the statue of f-father,” he said, his voice suddenly very small. Horatio shook his head.

“I’m going to be the perfect houseguest. Nearly indispensable in my manner and conversation. Completely undetectable when she prefers for me not to exist, even in the marginalia,” he promised. “The rare good influence from your school days. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Scholarship kid, highly subservient. The rare monarchist under thirty. Straight if I must, but no princesses in my sights. Nothing more. Nothing… untoward.”

“That’s asking too much,” Hamlet frowned.

“Mayhaps. You didn’t ask. I offered.”

“I am going to offer you a Dannebrog Cross after this in much the same manner. You will loathe it.”

“Downgraded from King Consort!”

Hamlet was laughing through his ubiquitous tears.

“You can have  _ both _ , you absolute provincial,” he grinned, plucked at the button fastening Horatio’s stiff collar with bitten fingernails, the dark polish on his thumbs chipped to the lunulas in a last-minute attempt at being presentable. “Don’t you know anything? They don’t cancel each other out. You can have both and more, so much more.”

“Then survive this,” Horatio said, eyebrows bunching, and Hamlet paused, only minutely, like he didn’t quite hear. “ _ Survive  _ this. That’s all I want from you. Hamlet.”

“Horatio.”

“Sweet Prince.”

“I want to do what you want,” Hamlet said softly, and felt the sick knot in his throat, more tears from a well he foolishly thought dry. “I want to do a great many things. I want to turn in my assignments on time, and use office hours when I’m struggling with coursework, and read all those books you recommend me, and keep my mess contained to my side of our room, my side of our life, I want time, god I want Time, I want to write that f-fucking play I’ve been piddling on, and I want to be out at the Court, no longer a dirty royal secret but really, actually  _ out _ , and I want to stop disappointing you with my myriad deficiencies and my genetic reliance on taxpayers’ dollars and my indulgent self-doubt and my comical lack of rigour. I’ve had everything handed to me, even you, and _ I’m so careless with my things _ .”

“Who do you think handed me to you?” Horatio asked, swallowing, freckles on his nose standing in sharp relief against the redness which presaged his rare tears, the ones only Hamlet could inspire, of course, because his particular melancholy was a contagion transferable through the ether and Horatio recklessly took too much of his bad air. Hamlet squeezed his eyes shut in a belated attempt to dam the stream. Canute could control the tide with his word, and even God stopped the fatal rainfall after forty days and forty nights, so why couldn’t he stop crying?

“Fate, I suppose,” he said, voice tight, but continued cautiously in Horatio’s studied silence. “A callous author with a ghoulish yen for EM Forster, if we’re having one of  _ those  _ unreality days. Perhaps a hapless Norwegian agent provocateur on a redundant mission to destabilize the least stable of the Danish royal family, and I applaud them if... You?”

“There we go. Fourth time is the charm.”

Horatio was hugging him tightly. Save a pallid and staged embrace from his uncle-father at the funeral, cameras flashing all around them to capture the mortifying moment for Danish Twitter’s trending (#longlivetheking #panic!atthefuneral #emoprincess), Hamlet hadn’t been touched at all since he’d touched down in Denmark.

Hamlet probably smelled like the gravesite’s dirt and old clothes and the last meal he’d eaten mindlessly with dirty hands in the servants’ kitchen, a gallon of stale coffee, hastily peeled and sulphurous hardboiled eggs, cold chicken off the bone, distantly wishing for pizza and shaking off all the while the pitying looks of kitchen hands who’d known him since he was a child and ate downstairs for dinner; his mother often prevented him from eating with the rest of the family when it was clear he couldn’t quite remember which spoon was for cold soups and which for gouging out his own eyes.

All this to say Hamlet was a spoiled, stupid Prince hardly befitting in title or manner, and in no way worth the airfare from Wittenburg, not a whole year’s, even a snail’s hour, a dustmote’s revolution of deferment from their excellent faculties. But Horatio held him like he was the inheritor of something worthy.

“So be careless with me,” Horatio murmured into Hamlet’s hair, unshowered for… quite some time now and roots showing. Hamlet sobbed; Horatio would keep on saying the right thing and there was nothing he could do to dissuade the onslaught of gentleness except sit and cry like he was opening him for field surgery.

“Blow me apart in a game of war like you did to your custom Barbie dolls of Danish Konigen past, tear me like your designer jeans. Write in me as you write in our books, and tear my endpieces for bookmarks, you animal. Scream and rage and weep these heavy well-earned tears, my good lord, but by every god I know I wish you would  _ do it _ . Did they tell you that you were careless every time you expressed yourself, every time you didn’t go along with the dress-up games they wanted to play? When you were tired at a royal dinner and started crying in front of childless foreign dignitaries who tried to talk to you about diplomacy because it was too much and you couldn’t remember the right answers and you wanted to go home? I wish they would have let you be careless.”

He observed him too well, maybe something Hamlet had facilitated with his bad gifts of barbed short stories, spiralling and unstageable dialogue pieces about living in a Faberge egg, a walnut and he was the meat, in the hollow round of a crown, a hamster wheel really. But the observation wasn’t the miracle; it was that Horatio had an endless capacity for listening, suggesting exactly what Hamlet needed but couldn’t try unless someone else said the word. And perhaps he would listen now, know what to suggest.

“I want to be home  _ now _ .”

“You must live this shit out. I know, it’s absolute shit, but home’s on the other side.”

“The Augean stables,” Hamlet sighed, let Horatio cling tighter, if possible.

“I said I handed you the shovel,” Horatio reminded. “I might as well set you to the task. So what task, my Lord?”

“Very well. Don’t… try and get in my way while I’m digging,” Hamlet sniffed, face blotchy and eyeliner finally giving up the ghost someplace between his chin and the bags under his eyes. He really needed to pursue a revenue stream with Maybelline after all this, their product was truly waterproof as advertised. “And don’t you dare get in that hole with me. Mucky work climbing back up, even with your sensible and fuck-ugly boots. I’m going to use this cursed body politic to  _ undo  _ this place. The first thing I’m going to do is eat, like with my perfect teeth and my gullet, those fucking scary priceless oil paintings from when there was feudalism, the ones which Mother always told me I couldn’t touch. Then I’m going to shit in the King Regent’s state car with some mighty nuanced chiaroscuro and wipe my ass with my birth certificate. See what he thinks of  _ that _ traffic ticket. I don’t think I’m going to be fully dressed for the next three weeks at least, ha. If our Norwegian cousin and his meathead mini-me son want to see the Danish tits and the childbearing hips which are next in line for the throne, they will, and I suppose the rest of the world will get to as well. It’s only fair. So hard to sweep these royal diseases under the rug in the era of the Internet…”

“You should submit these antics as your thesis when you return to school,” Horatio said, after a surprised laugh. “Marina Abramovic will surely be taking notes from whichever organic farm she’s pretending to be a tree at. Of course, I’ll be your hapless nursemaid in madness, dearest. But it’s surely treason to assume that a mere commoner, school friend, could do anything to soothe the whirligigs in your royal head but clear the way for your procession and dutifully observe. And take several pictures for his blog.”

“Leak my nudes,” Hamlet suggested with a devilish grin, and Horatio’s face fell. “Well, not the ones you like. Whichever ones you don’t like.”

“I like them all.”

“Then don’t leak them. They’re yours. You like them  _ all? _ ”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Hamlet definitely wanted to talk about that now, wished to know which ones Horatio liked  _ best,  _ but this wasn’t the most pressing matter at hand.

“You won’t tell anyone,” Hamlet said.

“What could I tell? This is past belief,” Horatio shrugged. “I would need corroboration from an inside source. Perhaps the last and maddest King of Denmark, who I hear lives elsewhere like one of the more well-off commoners these days, with his books and his wild garden and his mutterings and, well.”

“Well?”

Horatio looked down in a moment of shyness, rare at this stage in their relationship, and Hamlet’s hand lingered at his chin.

“Well?” he repeated, voice breaking with how quiet it was.

“Survive this,” Horatio said and swallowed hard under Hamlet’s piercing gaze, which unnerved those of lesser mettle but never Horatio, a man who could withstand scrutiny, didn’t break like pointillism. “Let me kiss the bruises and cuts you sustain in the bout, let them be the wounds that heal, not the ones the coroner speculates on. After your gorgeous catastrophe, I still need you to be part of what remains. I had plans for you, you see.”

“Sinister,” Hamlet said after a long pause, chuckled mirthlessly while he chucked off the top half of his customary suit of solemn black and down-gyved his stockings. “I should clarify, it’s my kind of sinister. Well done.”

“You’re going somewhere?”

“Dressed like this? But of course. Don’t follow me just yet,” Hamlet said, checked in the mirror to make sure he looked as mad and ragged as he felt. He caught Horatio’s glance in the glass and gave him a small, real smile, the first real one in far too long. “But stay. If you will. Rest.”

Horatio nodded.

“More knives in the bedside table. You know, if you need ‘em,” Hamlet called as he left his bedchambers, bowed deeply to a passing and scandalized courtier, who managed a quick photo even while she scurried away from his royal bareness. He remembered to gently shut the door after him, though. Hamlet couldn’t see the future, never had the gift for seeing past his own nose most days. An optimistic sybil like Horatio was a boon and a precious gift. Let him sleep while Hamlet kept everyone else up.

**Author's Note:**

> Oops I wrote this instead of sleeping! I swear I'm going to nap now <3
> 
> To uhhh anybody else reading this? Hope it makes sense. I'll annotate later maybe. It's modern era, so sue me, but because time is out of joint in Elsinore, it's also canon era so -shrugs- I don't make the rules. It's what he wanted. Sorry they didn't kiss lmao. I definitely think Hamlet and Horatio kiss, loads. I wanted to put one in there but I thought the life affirmations and the nudes and... stuff. Sorry it's not in iambic pentameter. I was going to do that but I ran out of night time. And I'm finally tired folks. Ask for antic/antique kisses in my tumblr inbox.
> 
> frawgkid.tumblr.com


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